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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare branding and communications expert with more than 25 years of industry experience. and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also worked extensively healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

As readers know, we’ve been tracking the progress of Meaningful Use uptake, and data has repeatedly suggested that small and rural hospitals were lagging behind. Now, courtesy of Modern Healthcare, comes an analysis suggesting that the EMR gap between small/rural and large/urban hospitals may be closing.

The magazine, which drew this conclusion after analyzing a CMS/ONC database of meaningful users of EMR systems, found that small hospital-oriented vendor CPSI has moved to the number one position among vendors “whose hospital clients have achieved Meaningful Use with systems certified as ‘complete EHRs.’ ”

According to Modern Healthcare’s analysis, CPSI’s 266 hospital clients account for 19 percent of the 1,381 hospitals that have become meaningful users with complete EMRs.

CPSI, which typically serves hospitals of 100 beds or less, can now boast more hospitals with so-called complete EMRs than larger vendors like Epic and Meditech. Epic has 251 clients which met Meaningful Use criteria for a complete EMR, and Meditech came in third with 173 hospital clients who were meaningful users of complete EMRs.

That being said, this doesn’t mean that the small and rural hospitals don’t face significant barriers when it comes to acquiring — and more significantly, developing sophisticated uses for — robust EMRs.

As the Modern Healthcare piece notes, far more large hospitals adopted an EMR in 2011 (25.4 percent) than did small hospitals (14.7 percent). There was also a big gap between the percentage of rural hospitals who adopted EMRs (19.4 percent) versus urban hospitals (19.1 percent), according to Mathematica Policy Research.

It’s also worth noting that when last we checked, smaller hospitals were generally far lower on the HIMSS EMR Adoption Model scale. Smaller hospitals and rural facilities were on average below 2 on the seven point scale, while urban and academic institutions scored much higher.

That being said, I like how Modern Healthcare used vendor data as a proxy for looking at the status of small/rural hospital EMR adoption. Good idea. Any data we have on how hospitals are faring is good data.